"Taiwan Studies Revisited" Book Event

Dr Dafydd Fell, Prof. Thomas B. Gold, Prof. Nancy Guy, Prof. Shelley Rigger, Prof. Joseph Wong, Simon Long, Prof. Melissa J. Brown, Prof. Mikael Mattlin

As part of the 2020 SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School, we kindly ask that you register to attend .

This event will be held online through Blackboard Collaborate.

*Please be aware that all Summer School event times follow British Summer Time (BST)

Abstract

"Taiwan Studies Revisited" examines and reviews some of the key figures in Taiwan Studies to plot the development of the field by revisiting their earlier influential books and bodies of work.

Often autobiographical in detail, each chapter asks the author to discuss the origins of their research and how their engagement with the field has developed since. The contributors then discuss their methodologies, fieldwork and arguments, as well as how their work was received at the time. They also go on to reflect on their chosen methods and core findings, assessing whether they have stood the test of time. Reflecting the diversity of the Taiwan Studies field, subjects covered in this volume include sociology, musicology, linguistics, comparative politics, international relations and anthropology. As such, this comprehensive overview adopts a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to understanding Taiwan.

Painting a picture of the changing state of international Taiwan Studies through the work of leading scholars, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of Taiwan Studies, Chinese Studies and Asian politics, culture and society.

Biographies

Dafydd J. Fell is the Reader in Comparative Politics with special reference to Taiwan at the Department of Political and International Studies of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is also the Director of the SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies. In 2004 he helped establish the European Association of Taiwan Studies. He has published numerous articles on political parties and electioneering in Taiwan. His first book was Party Politics in Taiwan (Routledge, 2005), which analyzed party change in the first fifteen years of multi-party competition. His second book was Government and Politics in Taiwan (Rouledge, 2011) and the second edition was published in early 2018. He co-edited Migration to and from Taiwan (Routledge, 2013) and his next edited volume, Social Movements in Taiwan under Ma Ying-jeou (Routledge) was published in 2017. He is also the book series editor for the Routledge Research on Taiwan Series.

Email: df2@soas.ac.uk

Thomas B. Gold is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1981. He also served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies and Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley. From 2000 to 2016 he was Executive Director of the Inter-University Program in Chinese Language Studies.Tom got interested in China as an undergraduate at Oberlin College. After graduating he taught English at Tunghai University in Taiwan. He then received a Masters in Regional Studies-East Asia and a PhD in Sociology, both from Harvard University. In February 1979, while at Harvard he was a member of the first group of American exchange students to study in China, spending a year at Fudan University in Shanghai.Prof Gold’s research focuses on many aspects of the societies of East Asia, primarily Taiwan and mainland China. In the largest sense, he examines the process of the emergence of the increasingly empowered and autonomous individual and a private sphere in authoritarian societies. Specific topics include youth, civil society, guanxi, micro-scale private business, popular culture, and identity. His book, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (1986) is a standard work in the field. He continues to research social change in Taiwan since the end of Martial Law in 1987.

Nancy Guy is an ethnomusicologist whose scholarly interests include the musics of Taiwan and China, varieties of opera (both European and Chinese), music and politics, and the ecocritical study of music. Her first book, Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan (University of Illinois Press, 2005) won the ASCAP Béla Bartók Award for Excellence in Ethnomusicology and was also named an "Outstanding Academic Title for 2006" by Choice. Guy's second book, The Magic of Beverly Sills, focuses on the artistry and appeal of the beloved American coloratura soprano, (University of Illinois Press, 2015). Her article, "Flowing down Taiwan's Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination," (Ethnomusicology, 2009) is a foundational text in the emergent field of ecomusicology and was awarded the 2010 Rulan Chao Pian Publication Prize. Guy is a Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.

Shelley Rigger is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics and Chair of Chinese Studies at Davidson College. She has a PhD in Government from Harvard University and a BA in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University. She has been a visiting researcher at National Chengchi University in Taiwan (2005) and a visiting professor at Fudan University (2006) and Shanghai Jiaotong University (2013 & 2015). She is a non-resident fellow of the China Policy Institute at Nottingham University and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). She is also a director of The Taiwan Fund, a closed-end investment fund specializing in Taiwan-listed companies. Rigger is the author of two books on Taiwan’s domestic politics, Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy (Routledge 1999) and From Opposition to Power: Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (Lynne Rienner Publishers 2001). In 2011 she published Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse, a book for general readers. She has published articles on Taiwan’s domestic politics, the national identity issue in Taiwan-China relations and related topics. Her monograph, “Taiwan’s Rising Rationalism: Generations, Politics and ‘Taiwan Nationalism’” was published by the East West Center in Washington in November 2006. She is working on a study of Taiwan’s contributions to the PRC’s economic take-off and a study of Taiwanese youth.

Joseph Wong is the Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, where he is also Professor of Political Science. Wong held the Canada Research Chair in health, democracy and development for two full terms, ending in 2016. Professor Wong is the author of several books, including Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics in Taiwan and South Korea and Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia’s Developmental State, both published by Cornell University Press. He is currently working on a book with Dan Slater on democracy and development in Asia. Professor Wong is also leading a large-scale project on poverty reduction in low and middle income countries. Professor Wong is the Associate Vice President and Vice Provost, International Student Experience, University of Toronto.

Melissa J. Brown is Managing Editor of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (HJAS), published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute. She was on the faculty at the University of Cincinnati (1997–2001) and Stanford University (2001–2011) before coming to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard in 2011 and joining the HJAS staff in 2014. Brown’s research examines identities and nationalism, marriage and kinship, footbinding, household economies, and cosmopolitanism. Her publications include Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities (2004), Explaining Culture Scientifically (2008), “Changing Authentic Identities: Evidence from Taiwan and China” (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, 2010), “Marriage Mobility and Footbinding in Pre-1949 Rural China” (Journal of Asian Studies 71.4, 2012), “Collective Identities, Shifting Population Membership, and Niche Construction Theory: Implications from Taiwanese and Chinese Empirical Evidence” (in Population in the Human Sciences, Oxford University Press, 2015), “Dutiful Help: Masking Rural Women’s Economic Contributions” (in Transforming Patriarchy, U Washington Press, 2016), and “Economic correlates of footbinding: Implications for the economic importance of Chinese daughters” (PLoS ONE 13.9, 2018).
email: melbrown@fas.harvard.edu

Simon Long is a journalist at The Economist, where he has worked since 1995, as Asia editor, International editor, Finance and Economics editor, South-East Asia correspondent, South Asia bureau chief and author of “Banyan”, a weekly column on Asian affairs. He is the author of “Taiwan: China’s Last Frontier” (MacMillan, 1991), and of numerous articles, papers and chapters on Asian affairs. He spent nine years with the BBC, as an analyst on East Asian affairs based in London, as Beijing correspondent from 1989-1991, including during the Tiananmen protests and their suppression, and Hong Kong correspondent from 1993. In Beijing and Hong Kong, he was concurrently correspondent for the Guardian newspaper, and wrote for many other outlets. He was for a number of years the author of Economist Intelligence Unit country reports on China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. In an earlier seven-year career as an investment banker, with Morgan Grenfell, he worked in London and Singapore, rising to a position of responsibility for the banking division’s Asian business.

Mikael Mattlin is Collegium Researcher in the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS), and Adjunct Professor in the University of Turku. He was recently also acting Professor of Chinese Studies in the University of Helsinki. Dr Mattlin is Associate Fellow in the European Research Centre for Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT), University of Tübingen, and he also runs the Helsinki-based Foundation for Foreign Policy Research. Dr Mattlin’s most recent book Politicized Society: Taiwan’s Struggle with its One-Party Past was published in April 2018 by NIAS Press (Copenhagen University). The book is a revised and expanded second edition of his acclaimed 2011 book. His peer-reviewed journal articles have appeared e.g. in The China Quarterly, Information, Communication and Society, Cooperation and Conflict, Journal of Contemporary China, Simulation and Gaming, Issues and Studies, Asia-Europe Journal, East Asia, Internasjonal Politikk and China Perspectives.

Organiser: SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies

Contact email: ml156@soas.ac.uk